Mrs Thompson v Miller Graphics Corniche Limited — 2022

Mrs Thompson, a long-serving studio employee, was dismissed on 23 December 2020 after the Respondent lost the Client A account and experienced a downturn during the pandemic. The Tribunal accepted that those circumstances created a redundancy situation under s.139 ERA 1996 and that redundancy was the principal reason for dismissal, but it found that the Claimant was selected because her work had been associated with Client A and the Respondent wanted to retain staff serving Client B, not because of age.

The age discrimination claim failed. The Tribunal accepted that the Claimant was treated less favourably than AW because AW was not placed in a selection pool, but it held that the difference in treatment was explained by the Respondent's commercial and operational decisions and was not because of the Claimant's age. The Tribunal rejected the submission that age was a factor in the decision-making.

The unfair dismissal claim succeeded. The Tribunal held that the Respondent undertook only a basic and cursory consultation exercise, with no warning or consultation about the selection pools or selection method before provisional selection, only one substantive meeting, and no meaningful reconsideration of the Claimant's points either at consultation or on appeal. It also found the pooling and scoring process unreasonable, because the Claimant was employed in a multi-skilled role including reprographics and other production duties but was placed in an artwork pool that did not reflect her actual work, while other employees were pooled in ways that did not fit the evidence of how the studio team operated.

The Tribunal found that there were no suitable alternative vacancies at the time of dismissal, but that did not cure the defects in process. It assessed a 75% chance that the Claimant would have been retained had a fair process been followed, so any compensatory award was to be reduced by 25%. It also held that there was no statutory ACAS Code on redundancies, so there was no uplift or reduction for ACAS breach.